


keep your picture clear

by voodoochild



Category: The Hour
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Obsessive-Compulsive, Past Relationship(s), Photography, Spain, Spanish Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 14:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Randall takes the dust on Lix's lens so personally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep your picture clear

**Author's Note:**

> Written for en-dejlig-rosa's prompt of "Lix/Randall, camera cleaning". Title from the Tom Waits song of the same name. 
> 
> For the curious, [this is Lix's camera, a Zeiss Contax II](http://www.pacificrimcamera.com/pp/zeiss/contax/contax2.jpg). Randall was given a [Hansa Canon](http://www.venusbuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/hansa-camera-595x359.jpg) when they first came out in '34 and it's kind of banged-up.

It wasn't the first thing he did in the morning, nor the last thing he did in the evening, but it was just as much a part of his rituals as anything else. 

Sometimes he had the proper equipment - chamois cloth, isopropyl alcohol - and sometimes, he made do with a clean corner of his vest and water. It's a Contax II, much newer than his own battered Canon, and he argues with her because she thinks the photo makes the journalist, rather than the camera. He knows her talent would shine through, whatever camera she used, but it helps to have the best equipment. He takes it out of her hands, always from her hands, because it means something that way. Like he's not just performing a service or a favor, and he confessed once it only ever felt right when their fingers brushed and the metal is warm from her skin. Like he didn't have to do it again to get right.

His fingers move light and deft over the lens adapter, removing it and wiping it down. Cleaning viewfinder and lens, moving the shutters individually to be sure no dirt had gotten between them. Grit is everywhere here, in their clothes and the creases of their skin - he thinks he hasn't felt clean in months. Makes sure to go over the film plate, keeps it firmly screwed onto place so the film isn't exposed. Runs his fingers over the viewfinder lens and the rewind knob, checks their speed and accuracy. Finally, a second pass over the aperture ring, always with some hidden dust to remove. Small, practiced movements, as calming in their own way as cleaning his gun.

Lix never speaks when he's cleaning her camera. Sometimes she ignores him - smoking a cigarette and flipping through a novel, listening to a record - and sometimes she sits opposite him on the bed, watches him and holds the lens while he resets the shutter speed. He's grateful, because he hates feeling as if he's imposing, and if she doesn't speak, she can't accuse.

The last thing he does before handing it back to her is snapping a picture. There are hundreds of them, and once, he'd had a copy of every single one. There are photos where she's laughing, when it's been a good day and no one has died. A few of her posed like a pinup girl, teasing the neck of her blouse down or once, memorably, reading in the bath. There are others where she's simply at rest; dozens of shots of her smoking a cigarette, pouring a glass of whiskey, looking out the window, typing up a dispatch. Others, he cherishes as proof she trusts him with her deepest vulnerabilities - days when bodies piled in the streets and they stepped through rubble where churches once stood and building shook with the force of bombs. Those photos are the ones when she can't bring herself to smile or do anything other than drink, where she curls into a ball on their bed and refuses to look at him. 

(There's a single photo of shattered glass and spilled whisky all over their floor. He tries not to remember that night. He'd lost his temper, she'd left for three days and he hadn't known if she was alive or dead.)

She never thanks him, in the later days. At the beginning, before it was a compulsion that intruded into their lives together, when it was just a sweet gesture he insisted upon, she used to smile and kiss him. Later, she would squeeze his hand and he would clutch hers in return. And then came Barcelona, reassignment, the mistake he's regretted for nineteen years. Every time he touched a camera in the following years, he would remember those small gestures, remember her. 

One of his companions in France fancied herself a photographer. Sweet, sterile subjects - bowls of fruit, happy children at play, a kitten on a balcony - and he'd ended things after a week of pure misery. Elodie had been nothing like Lix; he never allowed it, his companions were always younger, with a certain personability and discretion. The differences went down to the way she cared for her camera. It was a cheap, American model, you could barely adjust the lens on it, and she hadn't a clue how to care for it. She confessed to taking it to a studio a few streets away for simple maintenance, and the wave of distaste that swept over him had been profound.

A poorly-cleaned instrument isn't only laziness, it's disrespect toward yourself. Elodie's camera said nothing more than she was playing at photographer, and the state of Lix's camera upon his return to London told him that she barely considered herself a photographer any longer. 

The night after she gave him Sofia's birth certificate, he had let himself into her office after she left for the night. Had taken her camera apart piece by piece, cleaned it with chamois and alcohol, put it back together as immaculate as it had been in Madrid. Set the shutter speed to precisely what she used to use, and reloaded the film - Lix Storm, keeping a camera without a film in it? Horrifying. He had left it on her desk, along with a photo: one of the very few he'd allowed her to take of him, writing a dispatch longhand by candlelight. He had hoped she'd glean his meaning by it.

Some things are worth repairing.


End file.
